A train ride toward destiny

Obama, Biden make their way to Washington

January 18, 2009|By Mike Dorning Tribune Washington Bureau

President-elect Barack Obama tied the current challenges of economic crisis and war to the great struggles of the nation's past Saturday. Traveling to Washington for the inauguration, he retraced the final stages of the train trip Abraham Lincoln made to assume the presidency on the eve of the Civil War.

The daylong, 137-mile train ride, beginning in Philadelphia and incorporating rallies in Wilmington, Del., and Baltimore as well as "slow rolls" through communities on the way, permitted the incoming president to invoke the broad perspective of history while expanding the pageantry of the inauguration to a large swath of the densely populated Northeast.

The train arrived in Washington after dark Saturday. Along the route, knots of people bundled against the cold and in some places crowds of hundreds gathered at station platforms, parks, roadsides and even backyards to wave to Obama, many of them holding flags as the president-elect's train passed.

A crowd of about 60 in Oliver, Md., waited hours along the tracks for Obama's train, and when it rolled past they erupted, screaming and cheering, jumping and waving. Horns blared.

"I thought I'd never live to see a black president," said LaVerne Stills, 60, of Oliver. "I had to be here to experience this moment in history. It is an honor and a privilege to be standing here today." When the train rolled through a station in Claymont, Del., Obama stepped out with his wife, Michelle, onto the balcony of the rear car and pulled the train whistle several times.

The Obama entourage picked up vice president-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, at an outdoor ceremony in Wilmington, where a railroad conductor introduced the former Delaware senator to a crowd of thousands as "Amtrak's No. 1 commuter," a reference to the daily train trips Biden made for decades between his home and Washington. The crowd behind the rostrum sang Happy Birthday to Michelle Obama, who turned 45 Saturday.

In Baltimore, a heavily African-American crowd that local fire officials estimated at 40,000 turned out in 20-degree temperatures for a late-afternoon rally that filled a plaza in front of the city's war memorial. The first black man elected president and his striking wife left the platform to a recording of Ray Charles' rendition of America the Beautiful. Obama's remarks at each stop offered a somber assessment of the state of the nation he is about to lead even as he expressed confidence in better days ahead, previewing themes that aides said would be in his inaugural address.

He warned repeatedly of "false starts and setbacks, frustrations and disappointments" to come but asked for "patience even as we act with fierce urgency." Speaking to supporters before embarking from Philadelphia's stately 30th Street Station, Obama compared the country's current troubles to the arduous war fought by the founders who met in the city to declare independence, as well as to the secession crisis Lincoln faced when he passed through the city on his journey to the White House.

In Delaware, he invoked the risks taken by the state that was the first to ratify the Constitution. In Baltimore, he spoke of the troops at Fort McHenry who battled the British in the War of 1812 and inspired the poem that is the basis for the national anthem.

"Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast," Obama said in Philadelphia. "Yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that our founders displayed." He called the starting point for his ceremonial trip "fitting because it was here, in this city, that our American journey began."

Obama, who made a call to overcome divisions a signature theme of his barrier-breaking candidacy, referred back to the country's founding document to ask for national unity.

He said the challenges of the times demand "a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives - from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry - an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels."

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